Monarch Butterfly & Viviendo Aquí - Perspectivas de los jóvenes Reception

Please join us for our opening reception of the newest Lodge Exhibit featuring educational information on the origin and migration of The Monarch Butterfly & our Teen Corp program at The Museum of Boulder presenting Latino youth perspectives in Boulder County called Viviendo Aquí - Perspectivas de los jóvenes.

Jane Yamada will also be joining us for some caricature art fun!

To help raise awareness of the plight of monarch butterflies, the Endangered Species Coalition’s Southern Rockies Representative is leading a Monarch Origami campaign in Colorado.

This campaign was inspired by Sadako Sasaki, a young girl who survived the bombing of Hiroshima. However, years later she was diagnosed with leukemia. In an attempt to get better, she sought out to fold 1,000 origami cranes, a sacred bird in Japan. The legend explains that a crane “lives for a hundred years, and if a sick person folds 1,000 paper cranes, then that person would soon get well”. Unfortunately, Sadako died of her illness. She folded 644 cranes.

In honor of Sadako Sasaki, we worked with almost 100 Colorado volunteers to fold over three thousand origami monarch butterflies in an attempt to heal the dwindling monarch population in the West. Within each of the 3,571 origami monarchs is written the name of the person that folded it and a short explanation of why monarchs are important to them. The act of writing in the monarchs turned each one into a wish, an intention, or a prayer.

The Museum of Boulder wants to know how teens of Latin American descent represent themselves and their culture for museum visitors when given the opportunity to tell their stories without being filtered through an adult’s perspective.

Over the course of the school year, Museum staff and University of Colorado students in the Department of Education collaborated with Latinx teens to give them design an exhibit that answers the question: How do you represent your life and culture in Boulder County today?